Today marks the first of many upcoming moments of silence inGoogles years-long plan to kill cookies.
By the end of the year, cookieswill be gone in Chrome foreversort of.
For privacy advocates, cookies are the original sin of the internet.
But me love cookies!Photo: VIAVAL TOURS / Shutterstock.com (Shutterstock)
These are known as third-party cookies, and theyre built into the internets infrastructure.
January 4th, 2023, marksthe first phase of Googles grand cookie-killing spree.
When tracking protection is on, youll see a little eyeball logo in the URL bar.
Finally, you could go check your browsers preferences.
Google calls this project the Privacy Sandbox.
It involves several stupendously complicated tools and technologies.
Chrome then sorts you into different groups based on what kind of person you are.
Websites and advertising companies can ask Chrome what cohort youre in (e.g.
people who like high-performance auto parts or hair removal products).
However, theres no way for a company to learn about your individual browsing behavior without breaking Googles rules.
Its not exactly privacy, either, because youre being tracked.
Still, privacy advocates arent all thrilled about Chromes new data regime.
This is just another step in transforming the web app from a user agent to an advertising agent.
His response was what you might expect.
I think its telling us that were doing things right, Wong said.
Youll never get all these different groups to ever fully agree on one strategy.
Are cookies going away forever?
Have you ever wondered what a cookie actually is?
Thats used to check databases of information about you.
First-party cookies are cookies that are operated by the website youre looking at.
These can be harmless and even useful.
These cookies arent going anywhere, Google and plenty of users love them.
However, those third-party cookies are used to spy on you, in general.
(Remember, we talked about third-party cookies at the top of this story.
How did you get down here without reading that?)
These are the ones that Google is killing.
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